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The Murky World of 'Top Secret America'

The Murky World of 'Top Secret America'

by

Matthew Harwood

In October of 1952, Judge Learned Hand
delivered his famous speech at the University of the State of New York
passionately denouncing the culture of surveillance and suspicion that
had stricken the United States at the onset of the cold war. "I believe
that that community is already in process of dissolution where each man
begins to eye his neighbour as a possible enemy, where nonconformity
with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of
disaffection," he said.

Almost 60 years later,
Pennsylvanians have come to learn how prescient Hand's words remain
today, in post-9/11 America. This month, the state's citizens were
shocked when they discovered that their Office of Homeland Security had
been issuing intelligence bulletins to local law enforcement and private
industry that covered the activities of law-abiding activist groups,
most prominently those opposed to natural gas drilling. The bulletins,
however, weren't generated by state law enforcement. Instead they were
produced by the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, a Philadelphia- and Jerusalem-based consulting firm that received a $103,000 no-bid contract from the state homeland security director James Powers to identify threats to Pennsylvania's critical infrastructure.

Aside
from the obvious civil liberties abuses, Powers's decision to outsource
his agency's intelligence mission demonstrates that the murky world of
"Top Secret America" has trickled down to the states. Or in other words,
intelligence is now big business. In an explosive two-year investigation
published in July, Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M
Arkin described how the federal government has aggressively created a
hidden, lucrative industry of private intelligence contractors that help
the intelligence community do its job since 9/11. The downside of this
system is that it's so secretive and unwieldy that sources told Priest
and Arkin that agencies and their contractors do redundant work that has
of little or no intelligence value for unknown sums of taxpayers'
dollars.

These same inefficiencies also apply to
Pennsylvania's homeland security system but on a smaller scale,
providing a closer look at the pathologies of secrecy, waste, and abuse
created by the surveillance state. Since the leak of the ITRR
intelligence bulletin, Pennsylvanians were informed that their state
police already has an intelligence shop
that performs similar work. On Monday they also learned that not only
were the intelligence reports wasteful but positively harmful in the
beginning. According to the Associated Press, leaders from the state
police told a legislative hearing
that the bulletins initially led law enforcement to chase down phantom
threats before they directed "local stations" to ignore them.

"Every
so often they have something right. Much of the time it is
unsubstantiated gossip," Major George Bivens, head of the Bureau of
Criminal Investigations, told state senators, adding that the bulletins
were no better than the National Enquirer.

But the most
pernicious aspect of the scandal is that Powers used the state's
surveillance powers to protect private industry rather than the
constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens. When the initial
intelligence bulletin was leaked, readers found the report spent a
curious amount of time on activists who opposed natural gas drilling in
Pennsylvania because of concerns the drilling process results in
contaminated drinking water and environmental damage.

In an email
sent to what he believed was a pro-drilling advocate a few weeks ago,
Powers revealed why: "We want to continue providing this support to the
Marcellus Shale Formation natural gas stakeholders while not feeding
those groups fomenting dissent against those same companies," he said.
Powers's email is the rare, albeit unintentional, acknowledgment that he
is nothing more than an apparatchik of the corporate state, a corrupt
system where government power is wielded for the security of private
industry first and foremost.

Fortunately Powers's candour
has led to public furore, generating rare bipartisan consensus that
Powers and ITRR abused their authority. The outrage quickly led Govenor
Ed Rendell to hold a press conference and apologise for the bulletins,
terminate ITRR's contract and publicly release all 137 bulletins online.
Up to now, Rendell has spared Powers's head, although legislators at
Monday's hearing continued to call for his dismissal.

During
his speech, Hand described how a society can remain free, fair, and
good. "The mutual confidence on which all else depends can be maintained
only by an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion," he
said. Pennsylvania's surveillance scandal illustrates more intimately
what Top Secret America alluded to more academically: when governments
and private industry collude in profitable secrecy, open minds and free
discussion become threats to public order and security, and democratic
government and individual rights an illusion.

Matthew Harwood is a writer in Washington DC. His work has appeared in
The Washington Monthly, The Huffington Post, The Columbia Journalism
Review and elsewhere. He is currently working on a book about
evangelical Christian rhetoric and aggressive US foreign policy.

Further

In the vile wake of Charlottesville - those sweaty young white men, pasty faces contorted, screaming, "Blood and Soil!" "Jews Will Not Replace Us!" "Fuck You Faggots!" - what to say? Just this: This is racism, domestic terrorism, pure hate. This is not who we are, and this is not ok. Most vital, those "whose pigmentation matches theirs" must speak "with unflinching clarity (or) we simply amen it... They need white faces speaking directly into their white faces, loudly on behalf of love."

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